Here is Craig McCracken in his
(fairly) new office, full of toys and piñatas and
picture books, in a (fairly) new building in the city of
Burbank. Shaggy-haired, droopy-eyed, amiable, low-key,
casual, a regular-guy sort of guy. He hardly seems 29,
for that matter, which might have something to do with
the toys and picture books, might have something to do
with his line of work. You would not suspect his power:
It is the power of the pen, or the pencil, which in
either case is mightier than the sword (especially if
it’s one of those spy pens that’s also a gun). Mightier
than death rays, meat rays, dog rays. Mightier than the
power of your grown-up skepticism, your classical
aesthetics, your pathetic sales resistance. Foolish
humans! Resistance is futile.

Craig McCracken is 29
years old, and the whole second floor of the Cartoon
Network building has been set aside for him, for him and
his three superpowered little girls.

Blossom!

Bubbles!

Buttercup!

The official story is that
they were created by a certain Professor Utonium from a
mixture of sugar and spice and everything nice, with the
accidental addition of Chemical X. Thus, as it is
said, the Powerpuff Girls were born! But the
truth is that McCracken made them up himself. He was 20
then and an animation student at California Institute of
the Arts in Valencia, and they were called the Whoopass
Girls, which is not really as good as Powerpuff Girls;
it certainly doesn’t travel as well. With their
horizontally oriented oval heads and eyes as big as
dessert plates, their fingerless hands, their feet drawn
to resemble, according to McCracken’s instructions,
"socks filled with wet sand," they are not your average
little girls, not even your average cartoon little
girls, not even your average cartoon little girl
superheroes. They’re littler, for one thing: They’re
only in kindergarten. They don’t much like bugs. Bubbles
wouldn’t mind the hall light being left on at bedtime,
once they are done saving the day.

"I wanted to do a
superhero show," says McCracken, "where you really felt
these characters being strong and tough and heroes and
kicking ass — and what better contrast than to have them
be three cute little innocent-looking things? That’s
basically the heart of the show, this cute little girl
punching a bad guy and his teeth flying out. That’s the
visual soul of the show."

The City of Townsville, as narrator Tom
Kenny begins every episode of The Powerpuff Girls
by saying, is where the Powerpuff Girls kick that ass.
They kick a lot of ass, a lot of monstrous
villain ass. Sometimes they kick nonmonstrous ass just
because they get carried away. (Though they always
apologize when they do.) They never walk when they can
float or fly, they rarely use a door when there’s a wall
they can break through, and they have many times razed
the (amazingly resilient) city of Townsville in order to
save it. By Rugrats standards it’s a violent
cartoon, but it’s cartoon violence, because it’s, you
know, a cartoon. As Tara Charendoff Strong, the voice of
Bubbles, says, "I think all children love to watch
cartoons because it’s a fantasy world where anything can
happen — if someone gets mad at someone else, they throw
them off a cliff or pull off their head or whatever."

The PpGs (as they are
commonly abbreviated) may not offer children the most
desirable model for conflict resolution, but history has
shown that you can’t reason with giant flying eyeball
monsters, giant inflatable pond-things, alien broccoli,
smog monsters, snot monsters, the Gangreen Gang, the
Amoeba Boys, the frightfully territorial Fuzzy Lumpkins,
the creepy androgynous devil-headed
thigh-high-spiked-heel-boot-wearing Him, or their
favorite foe, the mutated supermonkey Mojo Jojo, whose
huge and powerful brain was produced by the same
laboratory accident that created the Powerpuff Girls. Cruel
irony! Notwithstanding Mojo’s claim that "Evil
geniuses are made, not born," the fact is that even
before he was an evil genius he was a naughty little
monkey. ("You were the worst lab assistant I ever had,"
remembers the Professor.) In the universe the Powerpuff
Girls inhabit, villains are with few exceptions naughty
by nature, and heroes are congenitally heroic.

"We’re going to fight
crime," says Blossom.

"That’s what we do," says
Buttercup.

"Duh!" says Bubbles.

And when they can’t fight
crime — as when bad little rich girl Princess Morbucks
became mayor and declared crime legal, or when Sedusa
disguised as Ima Goodlady worked womanly wiles upon the
Professor and got the girls grounded so that she could
steal the Mayor’s jewels undisturbed — they get fidgety
and cranky and sad. "And the worst thing is we won’t get
to save the world anymore," Bubbles lamented when they
were thrown in jail (victims of a villainous plot, I
assure you). Once, when it was raining out and there was
no crime to fight, they resorted to playing at being
themselves, humming their own theme music and pretending
to fly through the house, though nobody wanted to be
Bubbles — who has a reputation as "the scarediest,"
though she can kick your ass — except Bubbles.

Of course, the ass kicking
is only part of it; the rest of the story, or much of
the rest of the story, is one of sisterhood, which is
powerful, of teamwork, loyalty, duty, responsibility,
chores, homework, slumber parties, hide-and-seek,
coloring and ý tooth care. The girls squabble and
tease, as sisters do, but at the end of the day they
sleep together in one bed, and they have one another’s
back when the death rays, the meat rays, the dog rays
start firing.

It is two years ago this month that The Powerpuff Girls bowed
on Cartoon Network. It’s been five years since the first
fully realized pre-series shorts were seen on the
network’s World Premiere Toons program, eight
years since Craig McCracken finished Whoopass Stew,
his three-minute proto-Powerpuff student film, and a
decade since he first got the idea.

Yet for a long time, I had
thought them somehow my personal property, my own thing,
my secret discovery, a phenomenon known only to me and
"the well-meaning but often imperiled people of
Townsville." And then one day I looked around, and it
had become without my noticing a Powerpuff World. I went
to a pop festival and saw their faces multiplied on
Mylar balloons. I went to a toy shop and saw their image
graven in PVC and squeezable plush. I went to Doug’s
house, and his little daughter Franny showed me the
Special Product Preview of Puff Stuff that came with her
already dog-eared first issue of The Powerpuff Girls
Powerzine. In the window of a gas station in South
Carolina I saw a plush Buttercup for sale. I went on the
Internet, where the Powerpuff Web Ring lists 192 member
sites with names like Welcome to Townsville, Blossom’s
Crime Fighting Palace, Powerpuff Hotline
and Pokey Oaks Fanfic Library (named for the
school the girls attend), where the rules for submission
include "no extreme, realistic violence," "no excessive
blood," "absolutely no mutilation of children or
animals," "no swearing" and "no sex." Their official Web
site, powerpuffgirls.com, logs upward of 4
million page views a month. Their audience includes
children of all ages. Says Cartoon Network vice
president of animation Linda Simensky, "I think the
official breakdown is two-thirds kids, one-third adults,
but since there are no Nielsen homes in college dorms, I
figure there’s another decent percentage of college
students watching."

Their profile is
international. The latest broadcast technology and the
frightening reach of the Time Warner infotainment empire
— Cartoon Network is now available in 14 languages and
145 countries — have sent their image around the globe.
In France they’re Les Super nenas, Belle, Bulle and
Rebelle, et elles ont pour mission de
protéger le monde des vilains et cela avant
l’heure du dodo. In Spain they’re Las Supernanas;
in Latin America, Las Chicas Superpoderosas,
Bombón, Burbuja y Bellota (Chocolate,
Bubble and Acorn). In Italy, quando il pericolo
incombe su Townsville, the authorities do not call
for Hercules; no, it is for Lolly, Dolly and Molly, Le
Superchicche, that the hot line rings. In Poland they
are Atomówki: Bójka, Bajka and Brawurka.

The show won an Emmy this
year for art direction. Next month production begins on
the reported $25 million Powerpuff movie, the first
Cartoon Network theatrical feature, produced in
collaboration with corporate kin Warner Bros. and slated
to arrive in theaters sometime in 2002. They are a DC
Comics comic book. They are a Little Golden Book,
written and drawn by Craig McCracken himself, with his
drawings painted in classic Little Golden Book style by
Team Powerpuff member and old school chum Lou Romano.
"Those were big influences on a lot of us," says
McCracken. "When we were at CalArts, everybody
discovered the great design from those books." In
February a Powerpuff-sponsored car raced in the Daytona
500. There was a Powerpuff presence in the Ladies Lounge
of this summer’s Vans Warped Tour, and at the Boarding
for Breast Cancer snowboarding festival in Lake Tahoe.
Since July, Delta Airlines has been flying a Powerpuff
737, with the girls painted large upon its flanks and
tail. That same month, Rhino Records (an "internal
partner," in the corporate parlance) released The
Powerpuff Girls: Heroes & Villains, a "sonic
adventure" produced by Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh and Bob
Casale and featuring contributions from Devo, the Apples
in Stereo, Frank Black, Cornelius, Komeda, Shonen Knife
and (on a hidden track) the Dresden Room’s Marty and
Elayne, who cover "Love Makes the World Go ’Round,"
which the girls themselves performed in "Mime for a
Change" to bring color back to Townsville. And there is
an extra-long version of the superpowerful Powerpuff
theme, by Scotland’s Bis:

Blossom, commander and the leader

Bubbles, she is the joy and the laughter

Buttercup, yeah, she’s the toughest fighter

Powerpuffs save the day

Craig McCracken knew it
was a Powerpuff World the day he was driving along and
saw Powerpuff piñatas for sale on the roadside.
He pulled over, not to say "Cease" or "Desist" but to
buy some. He was excited! It was a pop-cultural seal of
approval. When he found a fan selling homemade Powerpuff
Pez dispensers, he was excited again. Because it’s one
thing to sign contracts with toy makers and clothing
manufacturers to commercially exploit your images, but
it’s a whole other thing, and in its way a cooler thing,
to be ripped off, to have one’s copyright violated.
Piracy is the sincerest form of flattery. It’s the
free-market reflection of the voice of the people. "The
weirder, more bootleg obscure stuff is always my
favorite," says McCracken, who likes all the official,
less weird stuff as well.

"Everything we do really
starts with the show," says Bob Bryant, who as head of
Cartoon Network’s Off-Channel Commerce group is the man
in charge of all the official stuff. He speaks a secret
professional language made up of phrases like "character
branding," "awareness opportunities" and "creative
integrity model," but he also says "neat" and "cool" a
lot and, like everybody else connected with the show,
talks about "the girls" as if they were real. "It’s
really just collectively being out there as ambassadors
to the show and the girls themselves. You just hope for
any given piece you can pull off the shelf that anybody
who is really a real core fan would either want it or
understand it or certainly not be turned off by it."

Notwithstanding that
today’s Powerpuff Girls PVC Figurine Gift Set may be
tomorrow’s nonbiodegradable landfill, the PpG product is
unusually smart and attractive and, for the moment,
irresistible. There are dolls of different sizes, some
with Velcro strips that let them hold hands, a Style
Salon Blossom with heart-shaped comb and mirror,
backpacks in vinyl and canvas, blankets, a sleeping bag,
a pink pearlized handbag, metal boxes (rectangular,
star-shaped) for keeping stuff or carrying lunch,
T-shirts, embroidered jeans, socks, underwear, pajamas,
talking key chains with squeezable foam heads, mouse
pads, luggage tags, beach towels, a beanbag chair,
umbrellas, foaming bath crystals, coin purses, alarm
clocks, animated watches, picture frames, pencil boxes,
diaries, calendars, magnetic memo boards, books, comic
books, coloring books, sticker books, videos, posters, a
board game, an Ultimate Art Studio, videos and DVDs —
Nintendo has just released Bad Mojo Jojo for
Gameboy, with Painting the Townsville Green and
The Powerpuff Girls Battle Him set for December
and January. There is a Pokey Oaks Kindergarten play set
with a little chalkboard and real chalk and a breakaway
wall for breaking through, and there is a Professor’s
Laboratory complete with sugar, spice, everything nice
(hearts, flowers, bunny) and a beaker of Chemical X.
There is a plush Talking Blossom who, when you squeeze
her squeezable plush stuffed stomach, says, "C’mon,
girls, Townsville’s in trouble," and a Talking Buttercup
who says, "Yeah, yeah, but all the fun stuff happens at
night," and a Talking Bubbles who says, "And I would’ve
kissed his little boo-boo" and "But then I remembered he
was a bad monkey so I kicked in his face." Oh,
Bubbles! Sales of Powerpuff product are projected
to exceed $300 million this year, not counting
piñatas.

Cartoon Networks new one-stop animation studio
commenced operations in May in a three-story building as
unassuming as a superhero’s hideaway — the Burbank
Police and Fire building across the street is twice as
flamboyant. In the lobby, there’s a Powerpuff Girls
totem pole, a big poster for Dexter’s Laboratory,
furniture you might find in a cartoon, and Red Vines and
pretzels for the taking. The interior might be called
rough-hewn office-industrial with subtle atomic
overtones. The walls of the back stairwell are covered
with animator graffiti, which had to be redrawn when it
was mistaken for ordinary graffiti and painted over.
Here and at Rough Draft Studios in Korea, the third
season of The Powerpuff Girls is being
finished; the fourth is in process, and when it’s
completed sometime next spring, says McCracken, "we’ll
just be full-on on the movie."

"Everybody here kind of
has their own world," says Genndy Tartakovsky, the
creator of Dexter’s Laboratory and director of
many Powerpuff episodes, whose own office is on
the third floor, "but we’re all friends, and everybody
loves each other’s shows, and I’ve never been in a
studio where everything that’s being made is great and
you can’t wait to see it."

"Cartoon Cartoons," which
is not redundant but specific (the first word modifies
the second), is the slogan of the network, which went on
the air in October 1992, the year after Turner bought
Hanna-Barbera and four years before it merged with Time
Warner, creating an empire of animation that pools the
cartoon libraries of Hanna-Barbera, Warner Bros. and MGM
and makes strange bedfellows of Bugs Bunny and Fred
Flintstone, Scooby-Doo and Droopy. Says Linda Simensky,
"I think the main difference between us and other
studios is that what we’re making really are cartoons
— they use all the elements of cartoon making, right
down to the occasional lapses of logic, where a
character can pull out something enormous from behind
his back or a tiny character can beat up an enormous
character. Their logic is cartoon logic. I think the
other networks’ cartoons are a little more about real
kids and real kid issues."

Cartoon cartoons are
without redeeming social content, except in the sense
that they are funny and exciting and sometimes
beautiful. The Powerpuff Girls are daily engaged in
questions of right and wrong, but they are pretty simple
questions, and the cartoon isn’t made to teach anyone a
lesson. (Just as Popeye wasn’t about the
nutritional value of green vegetables.) When Craig
McCracken’s mother told him that the little girl across
the street started flossing her teeth after she learned
that the Powerpuff Girls did, his response was, "Really?
I didn’t mean to be responsible for that."

Man is the animal that understands cartoons, that
can resolve lines on a flat surface into a
three-dimensional world — one of those little miracles
we all take for granted, but which is miraculous
nonetheless. "I was just totally drawn toward graphic
images," says McCracken, remembering his young self. "I
could not look away from them." He was just 3 years old
when he started drawing pictures of the superheroes he
saw on TV. "I would have an image in my head of, like,
Underdog and Superman hanging out," he recalls, "and I
would look through the comics or watch TV and would
never see an image of them together, and I would want to
have it, so I could see it, and I would try to
draw it and it was never satisfactory, and so I would
ask my dad to draw it for me. And then I’d have it, and
could look at it. It was almost like my brain was
already processing images and inventing things, but my
hand wasn’t skilled enough to do it myself.

"I was pretty obsessive
growing up and would have phases where I would be into a
certain character, and I would only be into that
character. The first character I was into was probably
Mickey Mouse, just visually, and then I discovered
Batman and Superman, and then I discovered Underdog, and
each character kind of ruled my life at that point, I
was totally into them, and drew them all the time." He
also liked live-action Japanese imports like Ultraman
and Spectreman, whose evil Dr. Gori, "a guy in a
monkey suit" with a silvery-green face and long blond
hair, "so he looked like this cross between a monkey and
Edgar Winter," partially inspired Mojo Jojo. And TheSmithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics "was
like my bible for years. I would thumb through that
every day."

The death of his father,
when Craig was 7, and the move of his family from a
small town near Pittsburgh to Whittier, California,
intensified his picture making. "He was a very outgoing,
very positive kid," recalls his mother, Eva McCracken,
"and then after his dad died he became a little more
withdrawn and started to draw more. Because of course he
had to start all over again, because we all came out
here and he had to make new friends and things."

In art as in evolution,
phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny: The human race and the
individual scribbler alike make their way from simple
symbols toward an ever more exact and shaded
reproduction of reality. But that’s only a sort of
progress: Citizens of the 20th century learned to see
(from cartoons as much as from Real Art) the beauty of
abstraction, of regressive simplification, of suggesting
a lot with a little, of rendering the world in signs and
symbols. The less realistic, more childish, more
essential image might be the less technically
impressive, but it’s also the less fixed, the more
flexible, the more suggestive, and so often the more
powerful.

"Mickey Mouse doesn’t look
like a mouse, but he represents a mouse," says
McCracken. "I’ve always liked that type of symbolic
design." The first drawing he ever made of what would
become the Powerpuff Girls was very small, "just the
essence of a character," and so he left out details —
like fingers. He tried later to give them fingers, but
it never looked right. "I tried to define all the
characters as iconic images," he says, and because they
don’t look like anything in the real world, they look
more like what they’re supposed to be, and more like
themselves. The more like an actual real monkey Mojo
Jojo looked, the less he’d look like Mojo Jojo. The
Mayor, with his sash and monocle and top hat floating a
few inches above his head, is, says McCracken, "the
visual representation of a mayor — [McDonaldland’s]
Mayor McCheese is the same kind of turn-of-the-century
mayor." Professor Utonium — partly inspired by Church of
the Subgenius avatar Bob Dobbs, whose bland, smiling
image McCracken used to see stenciled in spray paint
around town — "is supposed to be superstraight, and so
he’s all straight lines; he’s not colorful at all, he’s
real black and white." Miss Sarah Bellum, the Mayor’s
curvaceous, hypercompetent aide, whose face is never
seen, is "the typical hot assistant, though her best
feature’s her brain — but we only represent her by what
supposedly everybody cares about."

Blossom, Bubbles and
Buttercup are identical — they’re triplets, after all —
except for the color of their eyes and dresses, and the
color and character-appropriate style of their hair:
redheaded Blossom’s bow-crowned ponytail, which
functions visually as a superheroic cape; blond Bubbles’
Cindy Brady pigtails; brunette Buttercup’s severe,
helmetlike bobbed flip. Model sheets instruct animators
in the girls’ streamlined physiology: "Think of head as
a solid ball. Features are ‘painted’ on, they should
wrap around contour of head." "Keep body and legs short
and cute." "Hand ends in slight point (like a butter
knife)." "The girls’ arms are muscle. They’re solid,
not flat." It’s the very lack of detail that
makes them look substantial and strong.

We assume the nose. We
assume the fingers. In fact, we don’t want the nose or
the fingers, because they would mar the girls’
particular peculiar beauty. "People have asked if we’re
ever going to do a live-action Powerpuff," says
McCracken, "but I wouldn’t want to, because then you’re
defining them — they’ll have fingers and they’ll have
noses and they’ll be real little girls and it
just won’t be the same. But as cartoons they’re kind of
this symbolic catchall." And then there is the question
of the eyes, which no human head could bear, those big
eyes that remind some viewers of the big eyes of
Japanese anime, but which were inspired as much by the
kitschy art of Margaret Keane. (There are Powerpuff Girl
dolls on display in the Keane retrospective at the
Laguna Art Museum.)

"We both like really flat,
iconic, simplistic design," says Genndy Tartakovsky. "We
try to create our own universe, not based on life. The
trend now in animated feature films is to get as close
as possible to doing something realistic, but it’s
completely not interesting to me." By Disney standards,
The Powerpuff Girls isn’t animated at all, but it
is as animated as it needs to be. (When Craig McCracken
first went off to CalArts, he was worried it would all
be learning "to draw a deer running through the
forest.") Speed and power are suggested through dynamic
design, extreme poses, whiplash editing, the skittery
electronica of the soundtrack. One particularly clever
episode, all seen from the Mayor’s point of view, left
the screen black for a couple of minutes (he was
blindfolded). "Limited animation" — as opposed to the
"full animation" of, say, Pinocchio — began as
an economy, a cheaper, quicker way to produce cartoons,
but at its best, as in the short films of UPA or Jay
Ward’s Rocky & Bullwinkle et al., it
provides its own elegant shorthand solutions, trading
fluidity and complexity of motion for brilliance of
color and form and sharp verbal wit.

The Powerpuff Girls incorporates
within its deceptively simple aesthetic a kind of
résumé of the form."A lot of that
is just from doing your homework and finding out where
the best stuff was done," says McCracken. "It’s like if
you want to study great design you look at UPA and early
Hanna-Barbera, and if you want to study great timing you
look at Tex Avery and Bob Clampett shorts. For action
sequences look at anime — they really do it better than
anybody’s ever done it before. So it’s just a matter of
knowing where the best people are and learning from
them, and all those influences are sprinkled throughout
all our shows. There seems to be this focus on Powerpuff
as just this tribute to anime, but they’re missing the
UPA tributes and the Jay Ward tributes." There are
references as well, passing or extended, to Star
Wars, Diff’rent Strokes, The Life of
Brian, MontyPython, Spinal Tap,
The Karate Kid, The A-Team, Schoolhouse
Rock, The Princess Bride, South Park,
The Godfather, Star Trek,
Pokémon, Batman (the Mayor’s office
is modeled on Commissioner Gordon’s, from the ’60s
live-action TV series), Yellow Submarine, any
movie where a monster destroys Tokyo, the art of Ed "Big
Daddy" Roth, and the films of Jacques Tati, who appears
briefly as M. Hulot in a beach scene, while the look of
the Professor’s house recalls the boxy modern manse of Mon
Oncle.

The pictures are only part of the . . .
picture. The voices tell you who the characters really
are, and tell the writers, too, who are consistently
clever without being showy about it. The Mayor is played
by Tom Kenny (also the narrator, and the voice as well
of SpongeBob SquarePants and the dog half of CatDog on
Nickelodeon) as a kind of cross between Wizard of Oz
Frank Morgan and Ruth Gordon. Mojo Jojo, played by
Roger Jackson (who is the scary voice on the phone in
the Scream movies), would be just another evil
monkey without his particular redundant way of talking,
inspired by the rhythms of Speed Racer’s dubbed
dialogue and The Superdictionary, "a DC Comics
dictionary I had when I was growing up," says McCracken.
"It would define words using sentences, but it would
reiterate the definition over and over again, and when
you read them out loud they’re the funniest things,
because they would be defining, you know, laughing,
and it would say ‘Crypto made Superman laugh,’ ‘He made
Superman make an amusing sound come from his throat.’
When Powerpuff came around I just started
writing Mojo’s dialogue that way." For example, from the
episode where he turned everyone into dogs with his dog
ray: "I, Mojo Jojo, am your master and you shall obey my
commands like the dogs you are. Because I am your
master, it is I you will obey. Obey commands is what you
will do. I will give you commands and you will obey
them."

As to the girls: "For
Blossom," says McCracken, "I wanted a kind of sincerity
and strength and cuteness, and a real uniqueness to her
voice. Buttercup and Bubbles are more caricatures,
there’s the tough voice and the cute voice, but Blossom
is this kind of subtle in-between. Catherine was
perfect; she is Blossom. E.G. as Buttercup has
that gruffness, but there’s still a cuteness to it — she
doesn’t sound like a boy. Bubbles was probably the
trickiest to cast. A lot of voice actors do the
cute-girl voice, but it can become really saccharine and
turn you off. And we finally found Tara and she was
perfect, and she’s also developed this whole thing where
she freaks out and screams, and even when she tries to
act tough she’s still cute. When we were recording the
first show, there’s a line where Bubbles yells, you
callin’ a biped?’ And Genndy said, ‘That’s the show,
right there, that sound of this tough girl screaming but
still remaining cute.’"

"Bubbles is sweet," says
Tara Charen doff Strong (who is also the voice of Dylan
Pickles on Nickelodeon’s Rugrats), "and kind,
and willing to do anything for a friend, but she can
also be very strong and pigheaded. If someone says she
can’t do something, she’ll do anything to prove them
wrong. She can be pretty forceful. And she can also be a
baby that denies she’s a baby. You know, she sleeps with
her little stuffed octopus."

Spicy Buttercup, says E.G.
Daily (who also voices Tommy Pickles on Rugrats —
she’s Strong’s brother there and her sister here), "is
feisty. She’s passionate about things, and a little bit
aggressive — I get to rage out every now and then. You
have to be pretty contained a lot of the time, and
Buttercup sometimes gets a little leaky."

And of Blossom, the
everything nice in the PpG trinity, Catherine Cavadini
says, "She means really well. She takes herself a little
too seriously, I think. She’s a leader, so it’s a fine
line that I have to play, because I can’t go too cutesy
with her; even though she is cute, I have to
maintain that she’s serious and she’s smart. She’s the
one who’s always ordering everyone around. I have to
keep that in there, but also make her likable."

One night, when he was about 12 years old,
Craig McCracken said to himself, "‘Tomorrow I’m going to
start working on a comic book. I’m going to start trying
to do it.’" And he did, coloring it in with Magic
Markers. "And from that time, basically until I came up
with the Powerpuff Girls, I was always trying to invent
the character that was my defining character." He began
with "a generic mouse character named Marty Mouse. I was
into Tintin comics at the time, and I wanted to try to
write those kinds of adventure stories. I had a
dream-detective character that was inspired by Will
Eisner’s Spirit, I got into a George Herriman
phase and tried to come up with a Krazy Kat–type
character, I had an angry dog character called Crud
Puppy for a while, and right before I did Powerpuff,
I had a Mexican-wrestler hero named El Fuego, but I
never could really get into it so much."

But comics were too static
for the pictures in his head, and so he applied to the
CalArts school of animation, the Harvard Law of its
field, where he was accepted on the strength of his
sketchbook. Illustrious alumni include Tim Burton, John
Lasseter (Toy Story), Brad Bird (The Iron
Giant), Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before
Christmas) and various high-placed players in such
Disneyworks as Beauty and the Beast, The
Hunchback of Notre Dame and Tarzan.

"It was great meeting a
bunch of people who were into the same things I was
into," says McCracken. "We could communicate on a higher
level than I could with kids I knew in high school. Most
of the learning I did there was from other students,
’cause you’d all kind of help each other on your
projects. At a certain point I kind of stopped going to
class and just focused entirely on my film. I went to
design class and a couple animation classes, but most of
the time I just stayed up in my cubicle and worked. I
was on this rotating schedule where I would be up one or
two more hours every night, so I was never either a
night owl or a day person, it would fluctuate every
week, it would just keep rotating."

"I always used to go by
his desk," remembers classmate Genndy Tartakovsky, "and
his assignments were just amazing. Craig’s one of the
first guys who, when I looked at his drawings, I
realized how much further I had to go." They got to be
friends, Craig helping Genndy with character design,
Genndy helping Craig with animation. Tartakovsky — who’d
lived in Moscow until age 7 and learned English from TV
and comics — had transferred from a school in Chicago
along with his friend Rob Renzetti, who would go on to
work on Dexter’s Laboratory and Powerpuff.
"I was kind of cocky at the time," Tartakovsky recalls,
"because I thought, ‘Here I am after two years at this
one college, and I’m pretty much the best in the class,’
and I get to CalArts and I was like the bottom 10
percent. It was very intimidating."

McCracken and Tartakovsky
shared a vision. "The details might be different, but
the ultimate goal is pretty much the same," says
McCracken. "We both wanted to make the cartoons that
were what we thought cartoons were like when we
watched them as kids. A lot of times, shows that you saw
when you were young you see when you’re older and you’re
like, ‘What was ý I thinking? This was .
. . terrible.’ So we wanted to make the cartoons
we thought we watched, the memory of what we
thought they were."

By the mid-1980s,
commercial animation was in sorry, soggy shape. Outside
of the sort of small independent productions you’d see
in traveling animation festivals, there was nothing
exciting happening, nothing with a sense of history or
irony or mischief. With few exceptions, cartoons as they
were produced for television and (rarely) the theaters
were cheap, boring, bland, ugly, unfunny, joyless,
politically correct and designed not to offend any
sensibilities but the artistic. They lacked the true
wild cartoon spirit — the impertinence of a Bugs Bunny,
the unbridled id of Tex Avery’s wolves, the runaway rage
of a Donald Duck, the happy universal anthropomorphism
of the world according to Boop.

Then — just around the
time McCracken and Tartakovsky were starting at CalArts
— came The Little Mermaid, wherein Disney got
its commercial groove back and found a new old-fashioned
formula to beat to death, and Who Framed Roger
Rabbit, which celebrated the glorious anarchy and
lively design of the medium’s golden age, and then The
Simpsons, which conquered television and the
world. And suddenly cartoons not only looked like good
business, but, what was more important, they began to
look like cartoons again. A small but exponentially
influential new wave of "creator-driven," historically
aware, postmodernist cartoons appeared on TV, beginning
with Ralph Bakshi’s Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures
and breaking big with John Kricfalusi’s The Ren
& Stimpy Show. Hanna-Barbera got back in the
game with 2 Stupid Dogs, a Ren & Stimpy–ized
take on the studio’s early classic Huckleberry Hound
style, created by Donovan Cook, a CalArts (and Ren
& Stimpy) alumnus, who hired Craig McCracken
as an art director on the recommendation of another
CalArts grad, Paul Rudish; McCracken, who left school at
the beginning of his third semester to take the job, in
turn recommended Genndy Tartakovsky to work on the show.
Rudish, whom Tartakovsky calls "an overall genius,"
would help refine and define both Dexter’s
Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls. The
first episodes of each series, says McCracken, were
"basically made by the same guys, just a different
person in charge of it."

Both made their first
pre-series appearances as part of Cartoon Network’s World
Premiere Toons program. Dexter’s Laboratory,
about a suburban boy scientist with an anomalous
"foreign accent" who keeps an impossibly large secret
laboratory in his parents’ house, was the first to
become a regular series, debuting in April 1996, and
would four times be nominated for an Emmy. "Powerpuff
was a little shaky originally," says McCracken. "There
was one focus group with 11-year-old boys where they
basically said, ‘Whoever made this cartoon should be
fired,’ and I was in the room with all the producers and
the president of Hanna-Barbera, and it destroyed me."

But the constant inquiries
of fans of the two World Premiere shorts, Linda
Simensky’s love for McCracken’s Dexter storyboards,
and the desire to keep the production unit working led
to a second chance for Powerpuff. McCracken
settled executive qualms by further developing the
individual personalities of the girls, assembling a
"bible" in which he posed the girls 20 questions and had
each answer in her own voice. And as Dexter reached
the end of its 52-episode run (another 13 go into
production this month), the team segued into The
Powerpuff Girls,with McCracken taking the
lead.

"When I first started
working on the show," says Tara Charendoff Strong, "I
didn’t know it was going to be as successful as it was,
’cause a lot of the original scripts were very action
oriented, and I’d just be like ‘Pow! Take that! Ow!
Yeah.’ And I’d be like, ‘What is this show?’"
Says E.G. Daily, "You’re not talking about people who
have been doing it forever and forever and they just
have this formula down, they’re just sort of these guys
who started doing this tweaked cartoon and it
happened to work."

It has worked, though, and
not by accident, unless you want to consider the
distribution of talent accidental. Last year, McCracken
and Tartakovsky were named by Entertainment Weekly among
the 100 Most Creative People in Entertainment: little
kids who stared at pictures until they came alive,
growing up to make pictures come alive. (And this year
the Powerpuff Girls themselves made the magazine’s list
of — appropriately — the 100 Most Powerful People in
Entertainment.) But unlike Mojo Jojo’s, McCracken’s head
has not swelled. "My mother keeps telling me that I’m
famous, and I’m like, ‘The show is famous, people
know the Powerpuff Girls, but I’m nobody, I’m
just a guy.’

"My agent keeps saying,
‘You’re hot right now, let’s shop you around so we can
get your price up,’ and I’m like, ‘I don’t wanna leave,
these people treat me perfectly.’ They leave me alone
and let me do what I want to do. You can’t ask for
anything more." Tartakovsky, whose new series, Samurai
Jack, "a quirky action show," is set to bow next
summer, says the relationship with Cartoon Network is
"perfect. They just go, ‘We love what you do, so do it.
Here’s some money and some time, and give us shows.’"

It’s a good arrangement.
Everybody benefits. The creators, the corporations, the
consumers. McCracken has bought a house and is moving in
with his girlfriend, a Powerpuff storyboard
artist. Cartoon Network, which owns the characters,
reaps the financial benefits of a bona fide phenomenon.
I get to own a Pool Party Bubbles. (Well, my wife does,
but I get to play with it.)

And there are cartoons!
There are Powerpuff Girls cartoons!It’s
a funny thing to love a cartoon. How can you love a
cartoon? Human movie stars are at least real people —
you can run into them at the supermarket. You can learn
all about their private lives and personal thoughts.
Mojo Jojo may relax in a bubble bath when he’s not
fomenting chaos and trying to conquer the world, but
when he’s not in a cartoon, he’s nowhere at all.

And yet they live. They
are superpowered on the screen, but they’re magic for
real. Pictures that move! Drawings that speak!
Impossible things! They are constituted to make you
happy, these cartoon kindergartners, even while they are
knocking the teeth from a villain’s mouth. There may not
be a five-eyed snot-spewing elephant monster or giant
alligator at your door, but who hasn’t needed rescue at
some time? From the bills in the mail, the boss at your
shoulder, the mean kid on the corner, the aphids on the
roses, the clog in the sink, and all the various
grown-up voices of sensibility nattering in your head?
Relief is only a cartoon away. Pleasing colors! Pretty
shapes! Hearts and flowers and rainbows and guts and
gore! Once again — and again and again — the Powerpuff
Girls save the day!